To Boost Productivity, Yo! Sushi Heads to the Cloud

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Fast-food chain YO! Sushi hopes never to buy a server again, according to its IT Manager Billy Waters, and is placing its bets on cloud computing to improve productivity.

Running Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office and other applications on 7 year old servers was a cause of concern to YO! Sushi.

"The servers were reaching the end of their useful life and replacing them and upgrading our core office software would require substantial investment," Waters explains.

"We were convinced that there was a more elegant, cost-effective, and efficient alternative."

Determined to identify a flexible alternative that delivered the capabilities that YO! Sushi required - both today and for the future - and which delivered real value for money, Waters evaluated the options.

"Broadly speaking, there were three options: Replace and upgrade our on-premise infrastructure, partner with an organisation that provided hosted data centre services, or the Cloud," said Waters.

Yo! Sushi worked with IMGROUP, who recommended that the business migrated its entire infrastructure over to Microsoft Office 365.

"Microsoft Office 365 takes the industry's most recognised set of productivity and collaboration tools and delivers them as a subscription service," explains IMGROUP's Head of Online Services, Jeremy Neal.

"With Office 365, YO! Sushi could lower overall costs and deliver the right set of tools for the right users, all with appropriate layers of security and compliance."

"The more we looked into the benefits of Office 365, the more we realised that it could have been tailor-made for us - it was considerably cheaper than the other alternatives, far easier to manage and removed, at a stroke, all of our business continuity and disaster recovery concerns. It was, basically, a 'no brainer,'" Waters explains.

According to Waters, the cloud set-up will save YO! Sushi about 40% over a five-year period compared to an on-premise exchange server. "In addition to the up-front and long term savings, we get the benefit of having tools such as SharePoint online, as well as not being in the position of replacing an Exchange server again in five years," he explains.

"And the solution is future-proof. If we went the traditional route, we would have to do the same thing again in 5 years time. This way, we never have to buy a server again!"